Traditional art and sketching

Peruse our Sketching from the Imagination series, start your own sketch journal, or try your hand at clay sculpting! If you’re a complete beginner looking for a new hobby, or even an experienced artist looking for inspiration and workflow insights, our traditional art and sketching resources have plenty to offer!

3D digital art

Covering a wide variety of software and approaches, our books, magazines, and eBooks are there to offer you the support and motivation you need. Whether you want to sculpt a monster in ZBrush or create a stylized character in 3ds Max, take a look at our range to start your next project!

Beginner’s Guide to Character Creation in Maya continues 3dtotal’s tradition of offering helpful guides for beginners looking to step into the world of digital art. Talented 3D Animator and Trainer, Jahirul Amin, gives an insightful breakdown of how to model from scratch using Maya and Mudbox. Not only will you learn about the principles of rigging and animation, with a step-by-step guide detailing how to link the joints and create constraints and controls for animation, you will also learn how to correctly light and render your scene for porfolio-worthy presentation. Plus, in-depth chapters on anatomy will provide you with a solid foundation on which to develop your 3D character skills, so that by the end of this book you will have created your very own realistic walk cycle.

Luciano Iurino reveals the key to creating realistic textures in a three-chapter e-book guide dedicated to shaders. Focusing on textures and lighting in 3ds Max, discover how to create the perfect textured finish to your models in this three-chapter e-book guide. Luciano’s lessons will teach you how to create the great results on both the free model provided, which you can also apply to your own assets.

The Unreal games engine is a hugely versatile system that has been used to power a variety of best-selling video games. In The Unreal Game Engine, environment artist Andrew Finch looks at how to create game levels from scratch using the free Unreal Development Kit, starting with modeling the environment. He then addresses the two different ways in which you can create accessories for your scene – modeling in 3ds Max and importing them, or creating them directly in UDK – before adding textures and lighting. If you’ve ever wondered what it would be like to be a level designer and wanted some practical experience, then look no further than The Unreal Game Engine.

Last month we saw the last of our ZBrush speed sculpting projects, so this month we start afresh with a brand new series on creating that perfect ZBrush alien. To start us off, Tudor Fat shows us how to create a wheeled alien figure in his in-depth and comprehensive tutorial entitled The Engineer.

In our ZBrush Speed Sculpting tutorial, talented artist Mariano Steiner shares the interesting techniques he uses to create that perfect partial-zombie-corpse in his set of all-inclusive, how-to videos. And if that wasn't enough, we see the introduction of a brand new series on applying realistic textures and materials to objects, which is one of the most problematic areas in digital art.

Introducing 3DTotal's Stylizing Toons tutorial eBook, which uses both 3ds Max and ZBrush. Stylized Cartoon characters are very popular in the world of CG. However they are not always well executed. The art of finding a balance between exaggeration and design has caused artists problems for a long time. In this eBook Jose Alves da Silva will be showing us how to address this balance and master it to create stunning stylized cartoons. The entire process is explained from beginning to end, starting with gathering references and creating the concept through to modelling, sculpting texturing, lighting and post-production for both an Animal and Human character. If this is the kind of CG work you are into this is a must have eBook.

Total Textures V03:R2 - "Bases & Layers" consists of 157 materials, comprising of 481 individual maps including colour, bump, specular and some normal maps. Each individual material now has a unique matching bump, specular and, in a few cases, a normal map.

We have got so much great content in this issue that it is hard to know where to start, but we will kick off by talking about this month's interview which is with Jian Xu. Jian is a brilliant artist that has been setting the CG community a blaze with his amazingly realistic sculpts, and his ability to create such accurate skin.

This Next Gen Character eBook tutorial provides a comprehensive guide through the process of creating a 3D character intended for use within a next gen console environment. The eBook covers all of the key stages of the 3D pipeline from sculpting the initial mesh in ZBrush and optimizing it in the principal 3D packages, through to texturing and applying next gen shaders.